English

Eigenvalue falls in thin broken quantum strips

Analysis of PDEs 2026-05-26 v2

Abstract

We are interested in the spectrum of the Dirichlet Laplacian in thin broken strips with angle α\alpha. Playing with symmetries, this leads us to investigate spectral problems for the Laplace operator with mixed boundary conditions in trapezoids of thickness ε>0\varepsilon>0 small. We give an asymptotic expansion of the first eigenvalues and corresponding eigenfunctions as ε\varepsilon tends to zero. The new point in this work is to study the dependence with respect to α\alpha. We highlight a curious phenomenon of diving eigenvalues: when the strip is more and more broken, at certain critical angles, that we characterize, an eigenvalue moves down very rapidly below the pack of other eigenvalues. We prove that this occurs more gently at α=0\alpha=0 than at positive critical angles.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.08403,
  title  = {Eigenvalue falls in thin broken quantum strips},
  author = {Lucas Chesnel and Sergei A. Nazarov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.08403},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:45:07.578Z